What’s ripple?

As Nexter.org wrote before, this digital currency was released in 2012 it has a strong focus on banking market. Ripples code was written from the ground base. The main function of Ripple is to increase the speed of transactions between banking operations. Ripple also allows you to save on transactions.

Ripple technology is already used by top banks such as Bank of America, HSBC, and the Western Union “experiments” with Ripple protocols.

The first major cryptocurrency to be owned by a for-profit enterprise, Ripple saw a huge jump towards the end of 2017.

What’s XPR?

XRP is just a utility and not an actual digital currency: the banks or financial institutions that use Ripple carry out their transactions in XRP. The company calls XRP a “settlement token”.

Ripple’s value

In 2017, Ripple rose about 36,000 percent. Sound crazy, right!?

This massive rise can be attributed to an announcement that a group of Japanese and South Korean banks will use the Ripple’s XRP technology to modernize cross-border payments.

Ripple has generated many new features in the last year or two as it expands its list of high profile partners.

Last year, Ripple announced a large number of new banking partners at a time, including Santander and UBS. Last month, Ripple added American Express, a big name that sparked attention in Ripple and propelled XRP.

More recently, Bloomberg added XRP, litecoin and data to its terminals last month. This week, SBI Holdings, a financial firm in Asia, and SBI Ripple Asia announced that they would use RippleNet.

This does suggest that Ripple is here to stay and that its almost $2 value may look extremely cheap at some point in the future.

But Mike Orcutt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review has now argued that investing in Ripple as the new bitcoin, could be a misguided hope.

Mr Orcutt said: “But XRP was never meant to be another bitcoin. Ripple’s big bet is that XRP will become a ‘bridge currency’ that many financial institutions use to settle cross-border payments faster and more cheaply than they do now using global payment networks, which can be slow and involve multiple middlemen.

“Bitcoin could be used to do this too, but Ripple can settle 1,000 transactions per second, compared with Bitcoin’s seven, and its transaction fees are much lower.

“The idea is that this will in turn will make the currency more valuable.”

Joe DiPasquale, CEO of BitBull Capital, agreed that in his opinion Ripple is on the right track to grow from strength to strength.

He said: “MoneyGram is the latest example of Ripple’s masterful cadence of announcements of deals with large companies.

“Every time Ripple announces a partnership, we see an increase in value.”